Project Guidance

The course assessment is based as one part on a final course project.

Projects are done alone, by each participant in the course separately. The purpose of the project is to show what you have learned in the course in terms of data management, analysis, statistics, and interpretation.

Projects have to start from a research question and have an empirical focus, but at the same time critically reflect on methods, conclusions, and limitations.

The timeline of the project deadlines can be found below. The deadlines are up to the end of the day in Germany marked by each date.

1. Choose a topic

While you are following the course contents and doing the assignments, keep in the back of your head that you have to choose a research topic that is interesting to you and feasible to be completed in the given time spans. It is advised to keep short notes on potential project ideas that you come up with throughout the course starting now. These notes help you to follow up on a promising idea later and to expand it into your project.

2. Project registration

At the end of June (deadline 26.06), you have to register your project as a plain text email to max.pellert@uni-konstanz.de. A project registration is a short text that includes the following:

Invest time on designing carefully your project registration: once registered, you cannot change the research questions or project topic. You can later adapt steps in the planned data retrieval and analysis, but your final report has to argue why and justify the changes.

The registration needs to be concise but detailed enough to allow a reader to judge if you followed those steps when reading the report. Check out “ProjectRegistrationExample_SMDA.md” for an example.

3. Project presentations

During project presentation sessions, students give 5-minute presentations about their projects. This is an opportunity to get feedback, by presenting four slides:

1. Research question and motivation
2. Data and methods
3. Results
4. Conclusion and critique

Invest time on designing carefully your project registration!

Once registered, you cannot change the research questions or project topic.

You can later adapt steps in the planned data retrieval and analysis, but your final report has to argue why and justify the changes.

• 25% for the presentation
• 75% for the final report

Projects do not need to report “positive results”, what is important is that you show how you have addressed your research questions, document any issues or deviations, and critically reflect on methods and results.

Remember for the overall grade, that on top of the project presentation and report (60%) you can individually achieve an additional 4x10% (up to 40%) with handing in the assignment solutions.

A) Replicating a previous paper

Replication has to be critical and based on your own analysis, not the code of others

For simple papers, additional analysis beyond replication is expected

B) Building on your previous projects

C) Proposing your own idea

None of these paths has a higher expected grade, they are all equally valid.

Please make sure to go through all of the more detailed descriptions in “ProjectsGuide_SMDA.md”

Questions?